The EV Charging Gap: Why Multifamily and Commercial Properties Need EV Charging Infrastructure Now

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One in four new cars sold globally in 2025 was electric. Yet the buildings where nearly half the population lives and works still lack the infrastructure to charge them. This is the largest unaddressed gap in the EV transition and the window to close it is narrowing faster than most property owners realize.

The EV transition is often told as a story about vehicles. Sales numbers, battery ranges, model launches, manufacturer commitments. And on that dimension, the story is going well: global EV sales hit 25% of new car purchases in 2025, and the IEA projects that share rising further through 2026 and beyond. [1]

But a vehicle is only as useful as the infrastructure that supports it. And for the tens of millions of people who live in apartment buildings, work in commercial offices, shop in retail centres, or park in mixed-use developments, that infrastructure is largely missing. The overwhelming majority of public charging investment has gone to highway corridors and high-traffic commercial locations. The buildings where people spend most of their time, and where their vehicles sit parked for hours at a time, have been left largely behind.

That gap is not just inconvenient for EV drivers. It is a growing liability for property owners, a missed revenue opportunity for charge point operators, and an increasingly visible policy failure for municipalities and national governments trying to meet electrification targets. And in 2026, the forces closing in on it, regulatory requirements, tenant expectations, competitive pressure, and insurance and lending considerations, are converging faster than at any point in the previous decade.

This article examines the EV charging gap in multifamily and commercial properties: why it exists, why it is becoming urgent to address, what the practical barriers to deployment are, and what it looks like to close it effectively.

The standard picture of EV charging infrastructure shows a network that is growing rapidly. The IEA recorded 1.8 million new public chargepoints installed in 2025, a 33% year-on-year increase. [1] That growth is real, and it has meaningfully expanded the coverage available to EV drivers on longer journeys and in major urban centres.

What it has not done is reach the places where most daily charging actually needs to happen. Studies consistently show that around 80% of EV charging sessions occur at home or at the workplace. [2] For drivers with access to private parking, a garage, a driveway, a dedicated workplace bay, this is no problem. They plug in overnight, wake up to a full battery, and the public charging network serves only as a supplement.

For the estimated 40–45% of households in developed markets that live in multi-dwelling units without dedicated private parking, this calculation does not work. [3] Their home is an apartment building. Their car parks in a shared structure or on the street. And unless that building has installed EV charging infrastructure, they have no equivalent of the overnight home charge that makes EV ownership straightforward for the homeowning minority.

The same gap exists across commercial real estate. Office buildings, retail centres, hotels, hospitals, and mixed-use developments represent enormous concentrations of parked vehicles during the hours when managed charging is most viable. A worker who spends eight hours in an office building, a hotel guest who parks overnight, a shopper spending two hours at a retail centre, each represents a charging opportunity that most properties are not yet equipped to capture.

The EV charging gap in multifamily and commercial properties has existed for years. What is different in 2026 is the speed at which external pressure is forcing the issue into boardrooms, planning committees, and property management decisions that would have deferred it indefinitely three years ago.

Regulatory Requirements Are Moving From Optional to Mandatory

The EU's revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive now requires pre-cabling for EV charging in new and significantly renovated residential and non-residential buildings. [4] This is not a future aspiration, it is a current legal requirement for new construction across EU member states, with transition timelines that are already binding in several markets.

Right-to-charge legislation, laws giving residents and tenants the legal right to install EV charging at their own cost, has expanded rapidly. France, Portugal, Spain, and multiple US states have enacted it. São Paulo's 2026 condominium charging law is the most recent example. [5] In jurisdictions where this legislation applies, building owners who have not pre-wired for charging face the prospect of ad-hoc installations that are more expensive, less safe, and harder to manage than planned infrastructure.

In the United States, several states now require EV-ready infrastructure in new residential and commercial construction. California's Title 24 building code requires EV charging capability in new multi-unit developments. [6] Similar requirements are advancing in New York, Washington, and Massachusetts. The regulatory floor under EV infrastructure requirements is rising steadily, and property owners who wait for federal action are already behind the state-level curve.

Tenant and Occupant Expectations Have Shifted

In markets with high EV penetration among urban professionals, Oslo, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, parts of Southern California, EV charging availability is becoming a factor in residential leasing and commercial property selection decisions. Commercial tenants negotiating new leases are increasingly including EV charging availability in their due diligence. High-income residential tenants with EVs are choosing buildings that can charge them over those that cannot.

This is not yet a universal pattern, but it is moving in one direction. As EV adoption continues to grow among the demographic segments most likely to live in premium apartment buildings and lease commercial office space, the buildings that lack charging infrastructure will face a competitive disadvantage that compounds over time. The cost of installing charging infrastructure proactively is substantially lower than the cost of losing tenants to better-equipped competitors. [7]

ESG Reporting and Green Building Certification

For institutional property owners, REITs, pension fund real estate portfolios, large commercial developers, the ESG dimension of EV charging is increasingly material. Green building certifications including LEED, BREEAM, and WELL now include EV charging infrastructure as a scored criterion. Institutional investors and lenders are beginning to assess EV readiness as part of broader sustainability due diligence. [8]

The practical consequence is that properties without EV infrastructure face potential valuation discounts, higher borrowing costs, and reduced access to green financing instruments that have become mainstream in commercial real estate lending. The financial case for installing charging infrastructure is no longer purely about direct revenue from charging sessions, it increasingly includes the asset protection dimension of maintaining certification and institutional investor eligibility.

If the business case for EV charging in multifamily and commercial properties is strengthening, and the regulatory pressure is increasing, why have so few buildings installed it? The answer is not indifference. It is a set of specific practical barriers that are each individually manageable but collectively create enough friction to push the decision into perpetual deferral.

Closing the EV charging gap in a multifamily or commercial property is not a single transaction. It is a process that involves electrical assessment, hardware selection, commercial model design, installation, and ongoing management. The properties that have done it successfully share a set of common characteristics in how they approached each phase.

Start With an Electrical Assessment, Not a Hardware Selection

The most common mistake in property EV charging projects is beginning with charger selection before understanding the available electrical capacity. The charger selection should follow from the electrical reality, not precede it. A professional electrical assessment identifies available panel capacity, determines how many chargers the existing infrastructure can support without an upgrade, and, if an upgrade is needed, sizes it correctly for anticipated demand growth rather than current EV penetration.

Smart load management significantly changes the electrical math. A building with a 100-amp electrical service that appears unable to support ten Level 2 chargers simultaneously can often support them reliably if the chargers operate on a dynamic load-sharing system that manages total draw within panel capacity. The effective number of simultaneous full-speed charges is lower, but overnight charging, where vehicles are parked for eight or more hours, delivers adequate charge to all vehicles without requiring a panel upgrade. [9]

Choose a Commercial Model Before Choosing Hardware

The commercial model determines who pays, how, and for what. Three models are emerging as dominant in the market. In the owner-financed model, the property owner funds installation and recoups costs through a service fee or electricity markup charged to users. In the charging-as-a-service model, a CPO or EVSE provider installs and operates the infrastructure at no upfront cost to the building, recouping investment through a share of charging revenue or a management fee. In the tenant-led model, individual tenants or groups fund their own installation in shared spaces, subject to building approval. Each model has legitimate applications in different property types and ownership structures.

The most common project failure mode is selecting hardware before the commercial model is resolved, then discovering that the hardware does not support the billing, access control, or monitoring requirements the chosen model demands. Hardware specifications should be derived from the commercial model requirements, not the other way around.

Hardware Must Match the Deployment Context

Effective MDU and commercial property charging hardware is different from single-family home chargers or highway fast-charging equipment in specific ways. It needs to support per-user billing across a shared electrical connection, meaning individual metering or sub-metering capability is required. It needs RFID or app-based access control to ensure only authorized users activate charging sessions. It needs smart load management that prevents individual chargers from overloading the building panel during peak demand periods. And it needs to be maintainable remotely, with reliable OCPP connectivity and OTA update capability, because on-site technical maintenance visits in a residential building context are disruptive and expensive. [10]

Form factor matters as well. Parking garages in multi-dwelling buildings typically have lower headroom, tighter bay widths, and more constrained cable routing than standalone commercial sites. Hardware that was designed for open-plan commercial parking does not always install cleanly in an MDU garage. Compact wall-mount designs with flexible cable management options consistently outperform larger freestanding units in residential deployment contexts.

The EV charging gap in multifamily and commercial properties is large, well-documented, and increasingly understood by the stakeholders who need to close it. What has been missing is the combination of regulatory urgency, tenant pressure, and accessible deployment pathways that makes action more attractive than deferral.

In 2026, that combination is present. The regulatory floor is rising. Tenant expectations are shifting. Green building certification requirements are tightening. And the practical tools for deploying EV charging in complex property contexts, smart load management, per-user billing, OCPP-connected hardware, charging-as-a-service commercial models, are mature enough to make implementation straightforward for property owners who engage competently with the process.

The properties that act now will build the infrastructure their tenants and occupants will rely on for the next decade. The properties that wait will face higher costs, less favorable site economics, and the competitive disadvantage of having deferred the decision past the point where it was a differentiator and into the territory where it is simply an expectation.

The gap is real. The tools to close it exist. The urgency is genuine. What is needed now is the decision to act.